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Anaxagoras, again, in his assertion of a Mind pure and
unmixed, affirms a simplex First and a sundered One, though
writing long ago he failed in precision.
Heraclitus, with his sense of bodily forms as things of ceaseless
process and passage, knows the One as eternal and intellectual.
In Empedocles, similarly, we have a dividing principle, "Strife,"
set against "Friendship"- which is The One and is to him
bodiless, while the elements represent Matter.
Later there is Aristotle; he begins by making the First
transcendent and intellective but cancels that primacy by
supposing it to have self-intellection. Further he affirms a
multitude of other intellective beings- as many indeed as there
are orbs in the heavens; one such principle as in- over to every
orb- and thus his account of the Intellectual Realm differs from
Plato's and, failing reason, he brings in necessity; though
whatever reasons he had alleged there would always have been the
objection that it would be more reasonable that all the spheres,
as contributory to one system, should look to a unity, to the
First.
We are obliged also to ask whether to Aristotle's mind all
Intellectual Beings spring from one, and that one their First; or
whether the Principles in the Intellectual are many.
If from one, then clearly the Intellectual system will be
analogous to that of the universe of sense-sphere encircling
sphere, with one, the outermost, dominating all- the First [in
the Intellectual] will envelop the entire scheme and will be an
Intellectual [or Archetypal] Kosmos; and as in our universe the
spheres are not empty but the first sphere is thick with stars
and none without them, so, in the Intellectual Kosmos, those
principles of Movement will envelop a multitude of Beings, and
that world will be the realm of the greater reality.
If on the contrary each is a principle, then the effective powers
become a matter of chance; under what compulsion are they to hold
together and act with one mind towards that work of unity, the
harmony of the entire heavenly system? Again what can make it
necessary that the material bodies of the heavenly system be
equal in number to the Intellectual moving principles, and how
can these incorporeal Beings be numerically many when there is no
Matter to serve as the basis of difference?
For these reasons the ancient philosophers that ranged themselves
most closely to the school of Pythagoras and of his later
followers and to that of Pherekudes, have insisted upon this
Nature, some developing the subject in their writings while
others treated of it merely in unwritten discourses, some no
doubt ignoring it entirely.
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